by Harry F Rey
Two bloody bodies lay in front of the entrance to the docking hangar. More victims. I grabbed a rifle from one‘s dead clutch and slammed the control to open the docking pod, suddenly afraid the Crejan attackers might be on the other side.
They were. The heavy air-lock door slid open, and three of them stood around my ship. Their scaly skinned, horned faces puzzled by the Tevian markings on it. One of them ran a clawed hand along the edge.
I’d been killing Crejans for ten years. Instinct took over, and before they even had a chance to react, I fired three volleys. The weapon shot metal, not laser, but it pierced their reptilian skin just as well. The attackers who’d slaughtered the people of this base now lay dead on the hangar floor.
“I’ll kill you,” he screamed behind me. I turned as he fired a wildly inaccurate shot from a sidearm.
“No, wait. It was the Crejans. Look, I killed three of them.”
But he was beyond reasoning, completely overtaken by sorrowful rage. He raised the weapon again. His mouth started to form the word spy, but I didn’t give him the chance. I fired. The metal bullets ripped through his bloody overalls and ricocheted off the metal wall behind, now splattered with his insides.
I bolted to my ship, kicked a dead Crejan away as I climbed in, and left the base as quick as I possibly could. I’d take my chances on the slipstream.
“Let’s get to the Verge, Miri. Now,” I said as the tears began to fall.
“SPY! HE’S THE spy,” a high-pitched voice yelled out. “High treason against the high priest. Burn him!”
I lay on cold, hard ground. I tried to open my eyes, but they were crusted with blood and hurt like hell. I guess it was me they were talking about, the spy. I tried to bring one hand to wipe my eyes, but both came. They were still cuffed. At least the ladder was gone; and I seemed to be wearing trousers again. I tried to keep the screaming agony inside.
“The prisoner needs to die,” the voice said again, but quieter. Like it came from another direction. I couldn’t tell the gender, but it seemed to have a problem with me.
“Who are you? Where the infinity am I?” I tried as loud as I could. My voice croaked and sounded like a drill mining an asteroid.
“Bring him here,” commanded another voice. This one was definitely female. I needed to see what was going on. I scratched at my eyes, picking away the hard bits of dust and dried blood. In the blurry low light, two figures approached me.
“Don’t fucking touch me.” The figures stopped dead, and I managed to sit up through the pain. That they’d stopped gave me hope. Maybe they were afraid of me or thought I had value that could be bargained away. Letting my head sync with the horizon, I crouched onto my feet and slowly tried to stand despite the cuffs. The taste of blood returned but only because of how hard I bit down on my tongue to keep from screaming in agony. The chances of staying alive shattered into fractions.
“I’m an agent of the Trades Council,” I tried to say. The room spun like I had my own orbit, but I could start to see better. There’s definitely someone in front of me.
“Oh, are you now?” The female voice that’d said to bring me spoke again. I faced her. She sat on a large, ornate chair…no…more like a throne.
“Yes. And, you have—” I still struggled to breathe. “—violated, the rules of conduct. Of free trade. Free movement. In the Outer Verge.” I blinked and blinked again. Now I could see. She sat on a stunningly ornate throne made of green crystal, behind her a giant window that continued out of sight, showing the darkness outside. Like we were on a mountaintop, scratching the dark sky.
The two figures who’d tried to grab me protected her. They were clad all in black, even their faces obscured. Out of the corner of my eye, another figure floated at the side, the one who called for my death, wearing a bright-green robe, the same color as the crystals on the throne. The woman in front of me was draped in a shimmering white gown that fell over the crystal throne’s edge. She had flowing white hair and a thin bony face. To the eye, she appeared young, but to the mind, I could tell she was ancient. Svandor, the high priest.
“What brought you to our world, Captain Ales?” she asked.
“A mission of the Trades Council. One that was entrusted to me alone.”
“Cut the shit,” the figure in the green cape shrieked again. He seemed to float to the high priest’s side. His face like a punched stomach. “You’re an instigator. Agitator. Traitor. You’re in league with the Ingvar and the Union; we know it.”
I staggered slightly, in a half-conscious attempt to reach for a weapon I’d never had. The two black soldiers grabbed their high-powered ones and aimed them directly at me.
“Drop them,” the high priest commanded. Her voice as sharp as the crystals she sat on. “Who told you to steal our sacred Mantoc crystals from this planet, smuggle them out of the Verge, and corrupt them with foreign witchcraft?”
“What?” I demanded, feeling unjustly accused. “I only brought them here.”
“Aha!” the green cape shrieked again. “So he admits it.”
“Admits what? I’ve done nothing but…”
“But plant the bewitched Mantoc crystals here as a pretext for this invasion?” Svandor asked. It was hard to deny.
“Look, I had no idea what these things are or what they did. I didn’t know they were banned. I didn’t know the Union was planning to invade.”
“But you knew our world was under siege, did you not? You knew before you even stepped foot on Jansen that you were bringing in the very thing this invasion force was looking for.”
I tried to think of something to say, but nothing could come to mind. I’d been played, by everyone, and I’d lost. Svandor rose from her throne and stepped toward me, the shimmering white dress that extended into a cloak almost floating behind her. Part of me was mesmerized.
“For a thousand millennia, my people have guarded the Mantoc crystals. The sacred universe gives us all a task, and this was ours. This was mine. You do not know the sacrifices I made. To never leave this world, to pledge my own existence to their safety. You don’t know what you’ve done.” Her voice echoed across the cavernous room, devoid of any other sound.
“You’re how old?” I asked, only to stall for time.
Her mouth twisted into a cold smile. “My kind will live and die with this universe. Your life is a like a second to me,” she said, snapping her fingers. “But this second has changed everything.”
She came closer, so close I could feel her cold breath against my skin. From the pain and the fear, I breathed heavily, each one labored. Trying to remain standing, trying to remain still.
“Perhaps if Teva had never been destroyed. Perhaps if it had, and you had been too,” she said, shocking me. I had nothing to say even if I wanted to. “I do not know. The chain of consequence is too tangled for me to see anything clearly now.” Her features twisted, her eyes narrowed. “Everything in this universe happens with reason. And you defied that reason. You defied it with your survival, time and time again.”
Her hand brushed across my face, sending shivers down my body. Shivers that didn’t stop.
“You have no concept of the destructive forces that you, Ales, have unleashed on this universe.”
In one almighty explosion, the giant window of the throne room shattered. Hundreds of attack soldiers in antigrav suits streamed inside, floating in from the sky. In a moment, the two black-clad guards of the high priest lay facedown in a growing pool of blood.
Svandor’s bony hand grabbed for my throat. She didn’t show a shred of surprise. “The day will come when the dead will curse your name.”
Her grip grew stronger around the sides of my neck. Nails dug into my skin. She wasn’t trying to choke me, though, just hold on to my body for as long as she could. Out of the corner of my eye, the green-caped man’s head exploded, and his lifeless body fell to the ground before being trampled underfoot by the soldiers running toward me. I realized I couldn’t move. Somehow, she’d frozen me.
“Leave him,” a voice yelled over the crunch of boots on shattered glass. It was Turo, running at the head of the pack. He’d pulled off his helmet, and his sidearm was aimed directly at Svandor. She dropped her hand from my throat and stepped back.
“Turo, wait,” I said. I wanted to please for her life but I didn’t know why.
His face twisted in rage, but Svandor was nothing but calm. Her gaze didn’t move away from mine, and I couldn’t turn away from her. My cuffed hands were stuck to my body, my legs held stiff together. I couldn’t even open my mouth to breathe.
My vision blurred. Started to zoom out. Like a bird being pulled through the atmosphere. Suddenly, I could see all of Jansen City, the shimmering blue tower of the Capital Hotel that disappeared into a dot as the entire world came into view.
The orb of white and blue became smaller as it rushed away from me. Soon the other planets and moons of this system filled my vision, all swinging around that ancient red dwarf sun. Farther and farther, I went back or up, I couldn’t tell. Maybe even forward.
The entire Outer Verge expanded before my eyes, the silvery thread of the slipstream like a backbone running down the spiral arm. Even faster now, the entire galaxy rushed away from me. All the billions of stars and trillions of planets. The great galactic empires of the Kyleri and the Thranga and the Crejan, all swirling away from me.
More galaxies spun into view, twisting through my vision. More and more till what she wanted me to see came into view. The great cosmos in its entirety. Superclusters of galaxies like cells in a body with great arteries and veins weaving a web of connections between them. The edges folded back on each other. The entire universe like a glowing orb. I could see it all, and for that one spectacular moment, my consciousness merged with the consciousness of the cosmos. I suddenly became one with the existence of all the souls that ever have been or would be; all the pain, all the joy, all the fear and all the love in one undying moment of perfect unity. One flash of nothing and everything that could have lasted for an eternity, or be over in a fractal second. I couldn’t tell the difference. Then it ended.
It contracted as quickly as it had expanded. The edges of the orb of the universe, having reached their zenith, turned inward. Like I had been suspended above the universe by a cosmic elastic string, now I was plunged back in.
Everything went so fast. Galaxies collided and suns exploded as I was thrown through the contracting universe. As if the destruction of my home-world was nothing but a leaf falling from a tree. Everything collapsed in on itself, into the singularity from whence it came. Right before my eyes.
It all lasted for barely a second. Then it was over. I returned to my body. Right in front of Svandor, her stare still boring into me. I saw what she saw. I knew what she knew.
The flash from Turo’s gun made my eyes close instinctively. Now I could breathe, released from my prison. But I knew it wasn’t because of Turo’s weapon. Svandor had simply vanished. My body fell, but I didn’t hit the ground. A body caught me. Someone saved me.
Chapter Twelve
“DAD? DAD? WHERE are you?” I stumbled through the misty mountain brush, running, hoping to get out of the cloud cover. Maybe then I could find him. The air was so thin this high up I had to keep taking deep breaths to not feel faint. I nearly tripped on a rock. Only then I realized my hands were locked in front of me in electromagnetic cuffs.
I knew the mountain. I’d been here before. Our people believed the souls of the departed lived on this mountain, inside the caves, drinking from the fresh streams, bathing together in the volcanic springs. Anytime we wanted to communicate with our ancestors, we came to the mountain.
Finally, I came above the clouds and stopped running. A small plateau spread out before me, jutting out from the rock face. On a clearer day, one could see the planet’s curvature from up here. I caught sight of my father again, and it became easier to breathe.
“Dad. Dad, you’re here.” He turned to greet me, and I gazed upon his face, wide and smiling. His skin a shade blacker than mine, and the contrast with the white of his teeth and the white of his eyes always made me smile. But I couldn’t hug him with my hands chained together. “Help me,” I pleaded, “I’ve made a mistake.”
“No, son.” His voice sounded deep and soothing. His hands stroked my face. “You did what you must to survive. You had no other choice.”
“But Dad…aren’t you ashamed of me? Of what I’ve become?” I started to cry. I’d never cried in the six years since my world ended, neither in real life or dream life, but now I did. “I’m ashamed of myself.”
“Son, our people are gone. Our world, our gods, even this mountain no longer exists. You cannot hold yourself to a standard alone. Now it is time to begin a new journey, to write a new page. To keep our memories alive.”
I remembered my nightly prayer. How little it seemed to matter. To sweep across the stars. To bring the dominion of our world across all worlds. It was like a cruel joke now.
“Ales, my son. In you, our people may live. In you, the holy mission of the Tevian may be fulfilled. Go, my son. Go with courage. Courage in yourself.”
His face began to disappear. The mountain mist returned. It became hard to breathe again.
“Dad… Dad… What do you mean? I don’t understand…”
He disappeared completely, and I collapsed into tears.
I JERKED AWAKE, confused by my wet pillow till I realized it was from tears. I wiped them away. At least my hands were free now. I’d woken in a small white room. Perfectly clean, brightly lit, lying naked on a small single bunk.
With aching difficulty, I sat up. My bones and joints hurt. My head fuzzed like a bad vidscreen. I stood on the white-tiled floor. Stepping over to the window, I took in the view of space and then breathed a sigh of relief. Jansen remained. Turo kept his bargain.
I noticed my old clothes, a new uniform, and my wrist-tech placed on top of a storage unit. I blew a layer of dust and dirt off the screen and it came alive.
Trades Council Premier Arizal Forden welcomes Union victory at Jansen.
I clicked on the headline.
Council delegates unanimously accepted the rebel Jansen system’s surrender to the highly controversial Union security force contracted to keep peace in the Verge. Premier Forden called the victory, achieved relatively bloodlessly without the threatened invasion, as a “repudiation of those that seek to undermine our peace and our freedoms.”
I swiped away and more headlines flashed up.
How invigilators tracked Ingvarian spies across the Verge. Tons of dangerous Galinium seized by Union forces. Council proposes trade sanctions against the Ingvar, could all-out war follow?
Right then, the door slid open, and I instinctively jumped onto the bed, worried who might see me naked. Turo stood in the doorway, fully clothed in a tunic of Union blue. The pretense of neutral gray gone.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better.” His boots clicked against the floor as he stepped toward me. “You had an awful time. The biologist treated you with cell therapy. Nothing’s too damaged. You’ll be a bit sore for another day or so.”
I spun away from him to the window, trying to get a glimpse of the planet from orbit.
“Don’t worry,” Turo said, sitting beside me on the bed. “Your conscience is clear. No harm has come to Jansen.” He sighed and placed a hand on my naked leg, slowly stroking my skin. “Ales, I was wrong. We were wrong. Freedom can’t be saved by destroying it. We can build our empire through peace. Through the promise of discovery, not the threat of violence.”
His eyes calmed me. His blue, beautiful eyes. I exhaled and part of me unclenched.
“You and I,” he said, his other hand stroking my neck, “admiral and commander, master and servant.”
I melted into his touch.
“We can be incredible together. We can rule the Outer Verge. We can change the course of history in this galaxy.”
He kissed me, long and hard.
“So
,” I asked, “am I your prisoner now?”
“Of course not. This is your new home,” he said, pointing around the room. “That door leads to my quarters. The admiral’s quarters. I’ve been made head of this fleet, and you’ll be my second-in-command. In charge of thousands of soldiers, dozens of ships.”
I thought of my father. Of my long-lost world. Of my life until now. I didn’t know where this journey would take me, or if it was the right one, but I truly believed that I’d saved Jansen from a horrible fate. And maybe I could do that again. For the first time in my life, I might actually be where I was meant to be.
“Our agreement is that I’ll serve you—Turo. Not the Union, not the fleet. Only you.”
He smiled again.
“In time, you’ll come around. I believe in you, Ales, in your potential. You have…a sense of goodness, of right and wrong that, honestly, I don’t have. In here, you’re my property, but out there, you’ll be my heart and my soul. I might have a different way of looking at things, but from the second I saw you at the hotel, I knew you were what—who I wanted. Who I needed.”
In that moment, I could have been skirting the event horizon of a supernova that was about to blow. The intensity of my emotions, of what he brought out in me, was shocking. I didn’t know how much I believed him, but I had no reason not to. Not yet, anyway.
“Turo, it’s like all these years I’ve been alone, and I hardened myself against the outside. It used to be me, my ship, and finding whoever out there in the dark to do things with. None of it satisfied me. And you have to know, with Ukko, it was nothing. Really nothing. He was a taste of something I knew I wanted, but only a taste. You’re the real thing.”
He silently agreed but seemed distracted. “Ready to uphold your side of the bargain?”
I nodded.
“Now, sit back please, and open your legs wide.”
I did what he instructed, unsure of what would happen next. Turo brought an oddly shaped and shiny metal object out of his pocket; like a flaccid metal cock. His breathing became deep and heavy as he opened the device by dragging one finger down the middle.